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Let Them Drink;
Don't Let Them Drink and Drive

by Tom Gerety

Thanks to concerns about highway safety, we have laws in every
state that set our drinking age at 21. They are widely flouted and
give an important lesson in the ways that the best intentions make
the worst law.

In recommending a nationwide crackdown on teenage driving to reduce
the number of highway deaths, the National Transportation Safety
Board recently painted a picture of young teenagers who obtain alcohol
easily and who frequently drink and drive. Setting the drinking
age unrealistically high is not the answer. We should allow young
adults to drink as they do in Europe, teaching them to do so in
moderation. But we should not allow them, or anyone else, to drink
and drive.

I write as a college president and parent who knows that one beer
is his limit before going to sleep.

All around me - at my own college and those across the country
- I see drinking by students: some of it responsible, some of it
not. Many of those who drink on this and every other campus are
not yet 21. Indeed, we believe that some of our heaviest drinkers
are freshmen. One student told the dean of students that he was
shocked to find that college students drink almost as much as the
high school students he knew.

Not all students drink and overall they drink less now than they
did several years ago. But the many who do not know how to drink
in moderation give us plenty of cause for concern. Not only driving,
but dating, walking, and even horsing around can become dangerous
activities when students are drunk. Where students do become the
victims of sexual or other assaults, excessive consumption of alcohol
is often a contributing factor. The same is true of the campus high
jinks that lead to tragedy.

Students drink at bars with false ID's which are now ubiquitous.
They drink in their rooms with bottles of vodka purchased with the
help of their older friends. They go to parties where their peers
dispense beer as if on a rescue mission to people dying of thirst.
I asked a colleague who is president of a religiously affiliated
"dry" school what the situation was on his campus: "They
drink like alcoholics," he told me, "in their rooms, in
the bushes, behind the gym; they drink in secret because we punish
them for drinking openly."

One
important piece of information that we have managed to teach most
young people is that they should not drink and drive. That accounts
for the improvement over the last several years in the driving records
of those under 21. Fatalities associated with drunk driving by teenagers
are down 37 percent since l982. We need to bring that number down
further, and we can. If we are going to do so we need to focus on
the real problem: drunkenness, and in particular, drunkenness associated
with driving and other potentially dangerous activities - including,
nowadays, dating.

Recent reports from the Highway Safety Agency suggest that we can
continue to improve this record. First, the educational campaign
has worked in our high schools. In no small part this is because
the message holds up: Don't drink and drive, we say over and again,
providing examples of the results when people ignore that maxim.
Second, the enforcement campaign has worked, too. Most of us know
that policemen, judges and employers take drunk driving seriously
and that punishments are often stiff.

Mothers Against Drunk Driving, formed in 1980 by mothers whose
sons and daughters had been killed or injured in car accidents involving
drunk drivers, led us as a nation to be tougher and more vigilant
about the dangers of driving after drinking. To do something about
the random killing on the road by drunks, whatever their age, required
- and still requires - a massive and relentless effort to improve
our policing, our judging, our punishing, and our educating of drivers
tempted to drive after drinking.

Somehow this effort got confused with America's tendency toward
prohibition, in this case prohibition before 21. But prohibition
doesn't work, and it teaches young people hypocrisy and evasion.
All of us who teach know that our students are drinking long before
they turn 21, but none of us is in a position to stop them. And
where we would like to teach moderation, we are forced to teach
prohibition - a lesson that few will heed.

At the time this article was written, Tom
Gerety was president of Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut.
He is now president of Amherst College in Amherst, Massachusetts.